The Moonlit Way Part 82

She smiled, but the polite effort and her detachment of all interest in him were painfully visible to Esme.

"I'm sorry you still remember me so unkindly," he murmured.

"But I never do remember you at all," she explained so candidly that Barres was obliged to avert his amused face, and Esme Trenor reddened to the roots of his elaborate hair. Mandel, with a wry grin, linked his arm in Trenor's and drew him away toward the flight of steps which was the stage entrance to the dressing rooms below.

"Good-bye!" he said, waving his hat. "Hope you'll like my moonlight frolic!"

"Where's your bally moon!" demanded Westmore.

As he spoke, an unseen orchestra began to play "_Au Claire de la Lune_," and, behind the woods, silhouetting every trunk and branch and twig, the glittering edge of a huge, silvery moon appeared.

Slowly it rose, flashing a broad path of light across the lawn, reflected in the still little river. And when it was in the position properly arranged for it, some local Joshua--probably Corot Mandel--arrested its further motion, and it hung there, flooding the stage with a witching l.u.s.tre.

All at once the stage swarmed with supple, glimmering shapes: Oberon and t.i.tania came flitting down through the trees; Puck, scintillating like a dragon-fly, dropped on the sward, seemingly out of nowhere.

It was a wonderfully beautiful ballet, with an unseen chorus singing from within the woods like a thousand seraphim.

As for the play itself, which began with the calm and silvered river suddenly swarming alive with water-nymphs, it had to do, spasmodically, with the love of the fairy crown-prince for the very attractive water-nymph, Ythali. This nimble lady, otherwise, was fiercely wooed by the King of the Mud-turtles, a most horrid and sprawling shape, but a clever foil--with his army of river-rats, minks and crabs--to the nymphs and wood fairies.

Also, the music was refreshingly charming, the singing excellent, and the story interesting enough to keep the audience amused until the end.

There was, of course, much moonlight dancing, much frolicking in the water, few clothes on the Broadway princ.i.p.als, fewer on the chorus, and apparently no scruples about discarding even these.

But the whole spectacle was so unreal, so spectral, that its shadowy beauty robbed it of offence.

That sort of thing had made Corot Mandel famous. He calculated to the width of a moonbeam just how far he could go. And he never went a hair's breadth farther.

Thessalie looked on with flushed cheeks and parted lips, absorbed in it all with the savant eyes of a professional. She also had once coolly decided how far her beauty and talent and adolescent effrontery could carry her gay disdain of man. And she had flouted him with indifferent eyes and dainty nose uplifted--mocked him and his conventions, with a few roubles in her dressing-room--slapped the collective face of his s.e.x with her insolent loveliness, and careless smile.

Perhaps, as she sat there watching the fairy scene, she remembered her ostrich and the German Emba.s.sy, and the aged Von-der-Goltz Pasha, all over jewels and gold, peeping at her through thick spectacles under his red fez.

Perhaps she thought of Ferez, too, and maybe it was thought of him that caused her smooth young shoulders the slightest of shivers, as though a harsh breeze had chilled her skin.

As for Dulcie, she was in the seventh heaven, thrilled with the dreamy beauty of it all and the exquisite phantoms floating on the greensward under her enraptured eyes.

No other thought possessed her save sheer delight in this revelation of pure enchantment.

So intent, so still she became, leaning a little forward in her place, that Barres found her far more interesting and wonderful to watch than Mandel's cunningly contrived illusions in the artificial moonlight below.

And now t.i.tania's trumpets sounded from the woods, warning all of the impending dawn. Suddenly the magic fairy moon vanished like the flame of a blown-out candle; a faint, rosy light grew through the trees, revealing an empty stage and a river on which floated a single swan.

Then, from somewhere, a distant c.o.c.k-crow rang through the dawn. The play was ended.

Two splendid orchestras were alternating on the vast marble terraces of Hohenlinden, where hundreds of dancers moved under the white radiance of a huge silvery moon overhead--another contrivance of Mandel's--for the splendid sphere aglow with white fire had somehow been suspended above the linden trees so that no poles and no wires were visible against the starry sky.

And in its milky flood of light the dancers moved amid a wilderness of flowers or thronged the supper-rooms within, where Teutonic architectural and decorative magnificence reigned in one vast, incredible, indigestible gastronomic apotheosis of German kultur.

Barres, for the moment, dancing with Thessalie, pressed her fingers with mischievous tenderness and whispered:

"The moonlit way once more with you, Thessa! Do you remember our first dance?"

"Can I ever thank G.o.d enough for that night's folly!" she said, with such sudden emotion that his smile altered as he looked into her dark eyes.

"Yet that dance by moonlight exiled you," he said.

"Do you realise what it saved me from, too? And what it has given me?"

He wondered whether she included Westmore in the gift. The music ceased at that moment, and, though the other orchestra began, they strolled along the flowering bal.u.s.trade of the terrace together until they encountered Dulcie and Westmore.

"Have you spoken to your hostess?" inquired Westmore. "She's over yonder on a dais, enthroned like Germania or a Metropolitan Opera Valkyrie. Dulcie and I have paid our homage."

So Barres and Thessalie went away to comply with the required formality; and, when they returned from the rite, they found Esme Trenor and Corot Mandel cornering Dulcie under a flowering orange tree while Westmore, beside her, chatted with a most engaging woman who proved, later, to be a practising physician.

Esme was saying languidly, that anybody could fly into a temper and kick his neighbours, but that indifference to physical violence was a condition of mind attained only by the spiritual intellect of the psychic adept.

"Pa.s.sivism," he added with a wave of his lank fingers, "is the first plane to be attained on the journey toward Nirvana. Therefore, I am a pacifist and this silly war does not interest me in the slightest."

The very engaging woman, who had been chatting with Westmore, looked around at Esme Trenor, evidently much amused.

"I imagined that you were a pacifist," she said. "I fancy, Mr. Mandel, also, is one."

"Indeed, I am, madam!" said Corot Mandel. "I've plenty to do in life without strutting around and bawling for blood at the top of my lungs!"

"Thank heaven," added Esme, "the President has kept us out of war.

This business of butchering others never appealed to me--except for the slightly unpleasant sensations which I experience when I read the details."

"Oh. Then unpleasant sensations so appeal to you?" inquired Westmore, very red.

"Well, they _are_ sensations, you know," drawled Esme. "And, for a man who experiences few sensations of any sort, even unpleasant ones are pleasurable."

Mandel yawned and said:

"The war is an outrageous bore. All wars are stupid to a man of temperament. Therefore, I'm a pacifist. And I had rather live under Prussian domination than rush about the country with a gun and sixty pounds of luggage on my back!"

He looked heavily at Dulcie, who had slipped out of the corner on the terrace, where he and Esme had penned her.

"There are other things to do more interesting than jabbing bayonets into Germans," he remarked. "Did you say you hadn't any dance to spare us, Miss Soane? Nor you either, Miss Dunois? Oh, well." He cast a disgusted glance at Barres, squinted at Westmore through his greasy monocle in hostile silence; then, taking Esme's arm, made them all a too profound obeisance and sauntered away along the terrace.

"What a pair of beasts!" said Westmore. "They make me actually ill!"

Barres shrugged and turned to the very engaging lady beside him:

"What do you think of that breed of human, doctor?" he inquired.

She smiled at Barres and said:

"Several of my own patients who are suffering from the same form of psycho-neurotic trouble are also peace-at-any-price pacifists. They do not come to me to be cured of their pacifism. On the contrary, they cherish it most tenderly. In examining them for other troubles I happened upon what appeared to me a very close relation between the peculiar att.i.tude of the peace-at-any-price pacifist and a certain type of unconscious pervert."